1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is generally related to computer system storage media, and, specifically, to a bootable CD and method for transferring files to a writeable CD independently of computer operating systems.
2. Related Art
It is known to boot computers from a CD-ROM by using a floppy drive image stored in a boot record of the CD-ROM. One example of such a bootable CD-ROM is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,727,213. For many bootable applications, this method is sufficient for booting an operating system kernel and mounting the CD drive, for example, to repair a hard disk drive having a corrupted boot sector. However, the relatively limited amount of data capable of being stored in a floppy image restricts the use of this booting method to bootstrapping applications. If a user desires to run an application directly from a bootable CD, such as a CD R/W application, other methods must be employed. For example, the “El Torito” specification, developed by Phoenix Technologies, Incorporated and IBM Corporation, provides hard disk drive emulation for booting from a CD Rom using a hard disk drive boot sector image. The El Torito CD booting specification relies on an El Torito enabled BIOS and a boot loader to load the boot image from the bootable CD and associated tools into the computer's RAM. Although this configuration may require loading of the appropriate CD drive software driver, the booting process and the loading of the application are computer operating system independent because the booting process relies on the computer BIOS to load the application and the dependent software.
The operating system Linux, available from Red Hat, Incorporated, for example, provides a tool, mkisofs, to allow creating a bootable hard disk drive image on a CD using the El Torito standard for hard drive emulation. However, bootable CD's created using the Linux tool may be incompatible with some system BIOSes because mkisofs does not clear out partitions beyond the first partition in the partition table. Consequently, a bootable CD created using the Linux tool may not be bootable across all platforms strictly adhering to the El Torito Specification.